Character.AI, facing several lawsuits over its alleged negative impact on teenagers’ mental health, prohibits underage users from using open chat rooms on its site. Instead, teenagers will be able to apply them new format “Stories” whichunlike regular chat rooms, it offers “structured” choose-your-own-adventure-style experiences with AI characters on its platform.
Function is available to everyone, but Character.AI presents it as a way to “improve” the experience for users under 18 years of age. In October, Character.AI announced it would end teen chats on November 25 until it develops an age checking feature that will automatically move underage users to “more conservative” AI chats.
Stories allows users to choose from two or three AI characters, choose a genre, and then either write their own premise or apply the AI to create it for them. Character.AI will then create a “guided narrative” in which users can make recurrent choices that change the course of the story. The experience also includes AI-generated imagery, with “richer multimodal elements coming soon.”